The creation gives us a glimpse of the Creator. It is as if we are looking through a glass darkly. No man has seen God, but when we consider His creation, we see, in part, what He has done and what He is capable of doing.
Our understanding is so limited. Our brain cannot, to the smallest degree, begin to comprehend itself. It is so extremely complex that it alone speaks of an awesome Creator.
I think, “Why do I need to read instructions? Somebody had the intellect to design this thing, and that’s the hard part; surely I can assemble it.” Sometimes I can, and sometimes I can’t. God designed this world that we see, but most of it we can’t comprehend. For example, there is the theory of electricity. Man understands electricity enough to use it, but he only has theories about what it is and how it works. There are many other things for which man only has theories. “The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein. His work is honourable and glorious” (Ps. 111:2,3).
I would think it pleases God when we take the time to appreciate His creation. Not that we worship His creation, but that it causes us to stand in awe of Him.
From reading the book of Job, it seems that Job had an inquisitive mind and understood God by observing nature. This is made obvious by these next scriptures:
“But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind” (Job 12:7-9).
“He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing…By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens: his hand hath formed the crooked serpent. Lo, these are parts of his ways: but how little a portion is heard of him? but the thunder of his power who can understand?” (Job 26:7,13,14).
God did not need to create all the extras that we take for granted. God didn’t need to create different frequencies of light that make our world colorful. He could have created one frequency, and everything would be shades of that hue. Just ponder how the spectrum of light works. There are pigments on the surfaces of opaque objects that absorb certain frequencies of the light spectrum and reflect only the frequencies that make up the color we see. I stand in awe of the way it works so we can enjoy an extremely wide range of vivid colors. But color would have been in vain if our eye couldn’t capture and convey it to the brain or if the brain could not process it into something meaningful.
We could talk about the ears and how they are designed to give us the ability to detect from which direction a sound is coming. The shape of our outer ear is formed to make that possible. Sound in front of us enters the ear directly. When sound comes from behind us, the sound changes pitch slightly as it comes around our outer ear. Maybe the sound is louder on one side than on the other. Our brain processes all these inputs instantly. Consider how different frequencies of sound blend to create harmony we can enjoy! When we listen to a group singing, all the sounds combine into a complex sound wave that strikes our ear drum and is as one signal going to our brain. Our brain is then able to separate out the signal, and we can distinguish one voice from another.
Then there is deoxyribonucleic acid or, as we know it, DNA. The DNA within each of our cells contains all the information to initially construct our body and repair any part of our body that gets damaged. Each cell in our body contains the same information, and if a cell splits into two cells, the DNA is replicated in the new cell. Every cell has the information to replace any cell of any organ as needed. Any cell could become part of your eye if needed, or the same cell could become part of your finger nail. One way to think of it is that DNA is like the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences. The same letters can be rearranged to make a completely different word or sentence.
Next, let’s consider the incredible universe. To me the universe displays God’s awesome power and majesty like nothing else. I really enjoy this simple statement from the Bible: “He made the stars also.”
“Ah Lord God! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee” (Jer. 32:17).
“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Ps. 19:1).
Because of the earth’s rotation, the equator is traveling over one thousand miles per hour. We are speeding around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour. And within our galaxy, we are cruising at five hundred thousand miles per hour, yet we perceive nothing of it.
Following are some very large numbers relating to the universe. I have no reason to question them, because there is no correlation with evolution and time dating. Some of these discoveries were made possible with equipment like the Hubble telescope.
Light travels one hundred eighty-six thousand miles in a second. In one second, light could circle the earth nearly seven and one-half times. So when we talk about a “light year,” we are talking about a very long distance. It is estimated that it would take twenty-eight billion years for light to travel across the known universe. It is estimated that there are one hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. It is estimated that there are one hundred billion galaxies. So, how big is your God?
“Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth” (Isa. 40:26). This verse say God calls each star by name. That is beyond comprehension, to know multiple billions of stars by name!
The thing of interest in the following two verses is the “stretching out” of the heavens.
“The burden of the word of the Lord for Israel, saith the Lord, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him” (Zech. 12:1).
“It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in” (Isa. 40:22).
There are at least ten verses in the Bible that speak about the stretching out of the heavens. It has been discovered that the universe is indeed expanding. The fact that the universe was expanding had to be a revelation from God. It was declared in the Bible long before there was the technology to verify it.
The expanding universe can be described in a way that makes it easier to visualize. If you put raisins in bread dough, as the dough rises, the raisins move farther apart. They do not move through the dough but with it. So the space between galaxies is expanding, but the galaxies are not moving through space.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The word heaven is singular, and I think it is referring to the atmosphere around the earth. The first three days of creation, God’s focus was on the earth. The earth’s environment, delicate as it is, was created for man. Man was created last, because everything needed to be in place to sustain him. All things were created for man, as man is the crown of God’s creation. Figuratively speaking, we are living on a knife’s edge. There are many parameters which, if changed only a small amount, would make life as we know it impossible. Everything is extremely balanced.
For example, the length of a day is not just happenstance. The weather and ecosystem would be vastly altered if the earth turned faster or slower. Already the temperature extremes range from minus 128 Fahrenheit to plus 136, a range of 264 degrees. The energy from the sun and temperature differences drive our weather patterns, which are necessary for the distribution of water over the earth. The strength of gravity is important. Air has weight and is held around the earth by gravity. Less gravity, less air. With increased gravity, everything would weigh more. Our body structure would be too weak for the added burden. Structures in general would need to be built even stronger than they are.
The moon is important and not just there for us to admire. The moon helps stabilize the earth’s axial tilt and maintain the rotational speed. The moon also causes the ocean tides that rise and fall on the shores. By constantly exchanging the water, the tides keep inlets and harbors from getting stagnant.
We are around ninety-three million miles from the sun. It’s estimated that if we were 5 percent closer to the sun, the oceans would boil. If we were 1 percent farther away, the earth would freeze solid.
The sun is shrinking at a rate of two feet per hour. The diameter of the sun is 864,938 miles. So the sun’s diameter has shrunk by around twenty thousand miles since creation. But don’t worry, that’s only 2.3 percent of its original size.
Seeing all that God has done should make us stand in reverent fear of Him. We will stand before and be judged by the same God that has created everything we see, and the things we have not yet seen.
Albert Einstein put it very aptly: “We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”
From Messenger of Truth, Vol. 110, No. 19, September 19, 2012
